Authors: Robert Kroese
Free will in such a universe is necessarily a fleeting thing, almost impossible to acquire. Some will argue that what matters is not actual free will but rather the perception of free will – in other words, what difference does it make if all my actions are predetermined, as long as I
feel
free? This is, in my mind, an absurd and somewhat chilling question. If there is such a thing as real freedom, wouldn’t you prefer it over its counterfeit? The only universe in which it makes sense to be satisfied with counterfeit freedom is a universe where true freedom doesn’t exist – that is, a completely deterministic universe. In a universe where freedom is possible, settling for its counterfeit is tantamount to lying down in the muck.
That’s the last thing I remember reading before falling asleep on the air mattress with my Kindle in one hand and a drink in the other.
The next
day, a little after noon, I drive across the Dumbarton Bridge to Portola Valley and locate the address I had found for A. Heller. It’s a scenic, hilly area where the houses are a mix of old ranches that have been around since this was a farming area and newer McMansions occupied by software company executives. The address I have for A. Heller is one of the former. It has a long blacktop driveway that’s barred by a swinging metal gate, which is chained shut and padlocked. I park on the narrow apron of asphalt before the gate and get out. There’s a post with an ancient intercom box on it; I press the button for giggles, but nothing happens, as far as I can tell.
I take off my jacket, throw it on the passenger
’s seat of my car and lock the door. It’s chilly up here, but I don’t want whoever lives here to suspect I’m hiding a gun in my jacket. I squeeze between the two sections of the gate, stepping over the chain, and walk up the driveway toward the house, hands hanging visibly at my sides. I’m willing to bet that most of the people living in these houses have guns, and I don’t want to give someone an excuse to shoot first and ask questions later.
When I
’m about fifty feet away, the front door opens and a man steps out. He’s short, stocky, with thin white hair, looks to be in his late fifties or early sixties. I’m not positive, but I think he’s the guy from the YouTube videos. He doesn’t have a gun, as far as I can tell. I’m a little disappointed because I’ve always wanted to use the line “Easy, old-timer.”
“
Can I help you?” the man asks. That’s a little disappointing too.
“
Are you Dr. Arlin Heller?” I ask.
“
Who the hell wants to know?” That’s more like it.
“
My name is Paul Bayes,” I say. “I’m a friend of Tali’s.”
He frowns, but
not a
who-the-hell-is-Tali?
frown. More like a
this-schmuck-isn’t-good-enough-for-Tali
frown. I might be projecting.
“
How do you know Tali?”
“
I, uh, actually only met her two days ago. At the BART station in San Leandro. It’s complicated. I was supposed to meet her for dinner yesterday and she never showed up.”
This time I
’m sure I’m not projecting. He’s giving me the same look that the waiter at Garibaldi’s did last night.
“
Look,” I say, “I know how it sounds, but I swear I’m not some kind of stalker. I’m just worried about her. If you tell me Tali’s OK, I’ll leave right now.”
He regards me for a while, finally says,
“Tali never came home on Monday. Last I heard from her was around one o’clock in the afternoon. Said she’d be home in an hour.”
“
I was there,” I say. “When she called you. She said she got distracted, forgot to call you. She apologized and said she’d be home in about an hour. We were at a bar near the pier. Where … it happened.” I had to assume he knew what Tali was doing at the pier. The person she had talked to on the phone was clearly in on it.
“
Did she leave right after that?”
“
Pretty much,” I say. “We took a cab together back to San Leandro. I saw her get into her car. That’s the last I saw of her. We had made plans to meet and Garibaldi’s in Fremont at six the next day, but she never showed.”
“
She gave you this address?”
I shake my head.
“I did a little research online and found you. To be honest, sir, I don’t even know Tali’s last name. Is she your daughter?”
He laughs.
“Do you have some ID on you?”
I approach and show him my driver
’s license and my California state teacher ID.
“
So you’re not with Peregrine?”
“
Who?”
“
The insurance company.”
“
No, sir.”
He regards me for a moment.
“OK, come on in, Paul.”
He
’s cordial after that. We sit in the living room and he gets me a cup of coffee. Turns out that Tali was a graduate student of his at Stanford and is now sort of a live-in assistant. He’s clearly agitated about her disappearance, but trying not to show it. He seems to be avoiding the subject of what exactly Tali was doing on Monday and his own involvement in it. I mention that I’ve been reading his book.
“
Which one?” he asks. “
Gauge Theory of Elementary Particle Physics
?”
I shake my head.
“
Fate and Consciousness
.”
He chuckles to himself.
“I know, that’s the only one normal people read. It outsells the others a hundred to one. And my colleagues
hate
it.”
“
Yeah, I read some of the reviews. One of them called it ‘pseudoscience.’”
“
To some people, anything that isn’t science is pseudoscience. Especially if it’s written by a scientist. I could write a book of poetry for children and some idiot reviewer would call it pseudoscience. That book wasn’t written for scientists. I’d already written three of those, and if I had wanted to write another, I would have.”
“
But there’s a difference between popularizing a subject and bowdlerizing it,” I say. “It seems like a lot of the reviews were making the point that you were jumping to conclusions. It almost seemed to me like you were deliberately leaving things out.”
He smiles at me.
“So tell me, Paul Bayes, what were you doing at the San Leandro BART station?”
Ouch. OK, we
’re changing subjects, I guess. At least maybe I’ll get him to explain what he and Tali are up to, besides writing nutty books. “I was flipping a coin,” I say evenly. I figure he knows that much. I wonder what else he knows.
“
And Tali interfered,” he says.
“
She … tried to,” I say. Tried and succeeded, actually. Then she un-interfered, leaving things more or less as they would have been. Except that instead of going home, I went to Pier 39 with Tali.
“
Now who’s leaving things out?” Heller says, taking a sip of his coffee.
I decide to level with him.
“I’ll tell you everything you want to know, Dr. Heller,” I say. “But Tali interfered with my life … made a choice for me that should have been mine. To make amends, she promised to explain everything. Why she interfered, what she was trying to accomplish, how she knew about all this stuff in advance. She explained some of it that day, and she was going to tell me the rest last night, but she disappeared. If you’re willing to make good on Tali’s promise, I will tell you everything that happened the day she disappeared.”
He seems skeptical. He probably figures it isn’t an even trade, and he’s probably right.
Time to apply a little leverage.
“I suppose I could just go to the police,” I say. “Let them dig into what Tali
was doing and see if they come up with anything.”
He regards me carefully for several moments
. “Do you have a scientific background, Paul?” he finally asks.
“Does Mrs. Philips’ honors chemistry class count?”
He doesn’t crack a smile.
“I’m a high school English teacher,” I say.
“Did Tali impress on you the importance of not discussing this with anyone?”
“Yes, she did,” I say. “I’m not going to say anything, Dr. Heller. My only concern is Tali.”
Another long pause. Then he nods. “All right. Tell me what happened the day Tali disappeared and I’ll tell you about my work.”
I proceed to tell him the whole story, just the way I told you. Well, I leave out the part about looking down her shirt. A guy
’s got to keep some things to himself.
“Did she seem worried?” he asks. “Or frightened?”
“Frightened?” I reply. “No. Did she have something to be frightened about?”
“No, no,” he says, a bit too quickly. “
If I tell you about my work – our work – you have to promise not to say anything about it to anyone.”
“We’ve been through this, doc,” I say, getting a little irritated. “My lips are sealed.”
He nods and beckons to me to follow him. He leads me to a workshop that has set up in an old barn just behind the house. The barn’s exterior is made of redwood planks, most of which appear to be several decades old. One section of the barn has been recently repaired, though; the planks in this area still have some of the reddish hue of fresh redwood.
The barn doesn
’t look like much on the outside, but it’s a high-tech shop on the inside, with lathes, grinders, drill presses, welding equipment, soldering irons, and a lot of other stuff I don’t recognize. There are big tanks labeled Helium, Argon, and Nitrogen. In one corner of the shop is a neatly organized desk that I somehow immediately know is Tali’s.
Heller directs me to a workbench littered with electrical components: circuit boards, silicon wafers, batteries, capacitors, transistors, spools of wire and lots of other doodads and thingamajigs. He hands me one of the doodads. It
’s a black box that’s about the size and shape of my first cell phone, back in 1999. It even has a little rubber-coated antenna sticking out of the top.
“
What’s this?” I ask.
“
Psionic field detector,” he says. “I make them myself. I’ve got close to 300 of them up and running all over the Bay Area. I have Tali stick them on the backs of stop signs or on telephone posts, or wherever they won’t be noticed. They can run on battery for about a week, but the ones in the field have small solar panels connected to them to keep them charged. Every once in a while somebody will find one and take it down, but there’s enough redundancy that we always have pretty good coverage.”
“
Coverage of what exactly?”
“
Psionic field disruptions.”
I
’m inspecting the doodad. It doesn’t look like much. “Does that qualify as science or is that some of the pseudoscience stuff?”
He shrugs.
“It’s a bit out on the fringe. You ever watch any of those ghost hunter shows?”
Here we go again with the ghosts.
“I’ve seen a couple.”
“
They use EMF detectors to detect electromagnetic disturbances that are supposed to be evidence of supernatural activity. It’s mostly bullshit, though, because ghosts don’t leave much of a trace in the electromagnetic spectrum.”
“
You’re saying there’s such a thing as ghosts.”
“
Sure, in a sense. Conscious beings leave traces of themselves in their environment that are detectable even after the person is dead.”
“
And before the person is dead.”
“
Ah, you
have
been talking to Tali,” he says, smiling. “Yes, I was getting to that. OK, what’s the simplest way to explain this? Have you heard of quantum computing?”
I shake my head.
“Tali and I talked a little about quantum mechanics. Schrödinger’s Cat and all that. And I’ve done a little reading since then.”
“
So you know about quantum indeterminacy? The idea that it’s possible for matter to be smeared across an area probabilistically?”
I sort of shrug-nod.
“Are you familiar with Moore’s Law?”
“
The one about computing speed doubling every year?”
“
Eighteen months. Gordon Moore’s original formulation was that the number of transistors that can fit on a circuit board doubles every eighteen months, give or take. It’s the rare example of a law outside of the hard sciences that appears to be deterministic. Nobody knows why it happens, exactly, but for some reason just enough breakthroughs in miniaturization occur in the computer industry every eighteen months that computing power doubles. But recently we’ve reached the limits of miniaturization. We’ve literally made circuits that are as small as they can possibly be made: only one atom across. This has prompted a lot of people to predict the end of Moore’s Law. But these limits apply to the current paradigm of computer design, and may not hold true for different sorts of computers. One direction that industry might go in the future is quantum computing.”